For climate conscious eaters, beef has become the food to avoid. But what replaces it? For many people in the U.S., it’s factory farmed chicken, which has about one tenth the climate impact per serving. Some eaters might be surprised, though, to hear that this swap isn’t as environmentally friendly as they think. At a glance, the carbon footprint of factory farmed chicken is dramatically lower than that of industrially raised beef – but that’s dependent on scale, and as the industry expands, so do its emissions.
